The Cosmic Lover

By Paramahansa Yogananda

Circa 1930

	None I behold as stranger. I rejoice to love all with 
	the God-given pure feeling of human attachment. I care not 
	how many holy men howl, "Be attached to no one!" 
	I am attached to all. Nonattachement is necessary if 
	one’s love encompasses only one or a few, excluding 
	all others. Never could my attachment be exclusive, omitting 
	any form my circle of love! 
	
	To love all with genuine attachment, as one’s own, 
	is beautiful, enjoyable, heart-thrilling, heart-awakening. 
	It is He, the Cosmic Lover as the Cosmic Trickster, who comes 
	to us garbed in the forms of those we love - father, mother, 
	child, beloved, friend, acquaintance. In teaching us to give 
	love through parental, conjugal, and friendly attachments, the 
	Cosmic Lover 	surreptitiously imbibes from us in those forms the 
	attachment-fragrant love of our hearts, even as He gives 
	attachment-perfumed love to us in His guise of parent, 
	child, beloved friend. Why then does He cruelly break our 
	hearts with His game of hide-and-seek, making us love some
	of His forms as our own beloved ones and then causing them 
	to vanish silently behind the impenetrable screen of 
	dissolution? He thinks we take His entertainment amiss. He
	doesn’t wish to hurt us with pangs of separation; but 
	with all-embracing attachment to His infinitely diverse 
	forms in all incarnations and ages. He seeks our steadfast 
	love - pure, spiritual, wholehearted, with perfect 
	abandonment - as He peals to us to love Him unconditionally 
	in His multifarious roles - in a healthy or a diseased body, 
	as a rich father or poor mother, kind friend or treacherous 
	foe, king or servant, protector or enemy, admirer or caustic 
	critic, brother or beloved, son or daughter, doctor or 
	minister; as a bird, a beast, a flower; as the skiey 
	star-bosomed beauty above, or the wave-breasted blue brine 
	below. 

	The Infinite Entertainer forbids that we love Him forever in 
	only select forms of our choosing, lest we fail to appreciate 
	the entertainment of His ever-changing, infinite variety of 
	forms. But to teach us what love is, the Cosmic Lover invites 
	us in the beginning to love Him in any way we please, until 
	through the silent coaxing of His courtship, our love becomes 
	purified, free from taints of selfishness, individual 
	attachment, sense blindness, finiteness, mortal limitations, 
	pangs of separation, temporality, meanness, emotionalism 
	fickleness, human indifference and forgetfulness, blasts of 
	death and oblivion.
 
	Let us be not afraid to love our dear ones, foolishly
	fearing to lose them in the mists of death. Love them so 
	dearly, so truly, so purely, and forever unlamentingly - 
	even in temporary, love kindling separation - that you find 
	in them the everlasting true love of God. Finding Divine Love 
	you will find beneath Its canopy all your loved ones of all 
	incarnations, and with omnipresent love you will embrace
	not only them, but all heretofore unseen, unknown forms of 
	the Cosmic Lover. 

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